Casinos don’t have clocks.

Ryan Holiday (media critic, stoicism vendor, marketing strategist) is ‘the best-selling author of Trust Me, I’m Lying: Confessions of a Media Manipulator. Ryan is an editor-at-large for the Observer, and he lives in Austin, Texas’.

In a recent article he is asking people to stop watching news/tv/screens..

Here is a couple of fabulous paragraphs that I’d like to share with you

Facebook is not unlike a casino. You ever notice that there are no clocks in a casino? They don’t want you to know what time it is or how long you’ve been there. Facebook is sort of the same thing. It’s designed to keep you in Facebook as long as possible, clicking as many things as possible. Uploading, sharing, intertwining your life into the social network. So, on the one hand that is a large part of why we are so obsessed with the news despite our understanding of how misleading it often is.

The same goes for every other publisher or platform. Television doesn’t want you to get up and take action, they want you to sit through the commercial break. A news outlet doesn’t want you to be so outraged by an article that you do something, that you decide to change the world, they want you to be so outraged that you sign a Change.org petition and then consider it a job well done.

I have been a long-standing critic of ‘time management techniques’ perhaps because my own inability to have a good one. I am today convinced that protecting time and attention, controlling where to focus energy and brain power, is the serious, ultimate competence. I think there should be Intense Rehabilitation Bootcamps about it. Book me in.